If you’re on the Twitters-dot-com, you’ll have noticed
their craptastic new revenue-generating capability: “promoted” tweets.
For whatever amount of money (look it up if you care; I
don’t), you can have one of your tweets appear in some algorithm-determined
number of people’s timelines, whether or not they follow you. (Apparently you
can pay to have them appear for a long time, because I’ve seen some that
originated last year. Don’t they understand that tweets, like fish, go off after a few
days?) Basically, it’s like TV commercials, because they interrupt the flow of
the nonsense you already have signed up to get, by virtue of following people.
Actually, it’s like TV commercials from the last century, precisely because they
show up in the timelines of people who have neither need for nor interest in
your product, and all you do is piss them off. (Like high school kids and
garage bands being offered great deals on Siemens infrastructure or call center
solutions.)
And Twitter is exactly the platform for people to express
their pissed-offedness.
For example: this promoted tweet from Grey Goose,
inviting folks to “engage” with these ESPY awards. (Yeah, right—no idea, and no
desire to investigate.) So between the product and the honoree, we struck gold
with the first two responses.
Then there was this one from…well, dunno, really. The
White House? The Conference on Aging? The Society for Honoring Lots of Stuff?
Again, the first two responses are just stellar.
Twitter is obviously making money off this crap, so it’s
not going to stop. In the meantime, as I’m blocking the hell out of these
twits, I do enjoy watching the pushback.
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